[tpm] Fwd: Founding a Perlmongers group

[Mike Stok]

This came up in a London PM mail thread; there might be some good ideas we can borrow.  If anyone has comments or suggestions then feel free to shout them out to the list.

Mike

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Ovid <publiustemp-londonpm at yahoo.com>
> Date: February 17, 2010 8:19:23 AM EST
> To: "London.pm Perl M\[ou\]ngers" <london.pm at london.pm.org>
> Subject: Re: Founding a Perlmongers group
> Reply-To: publiustemp-londonpm at yahoo.com, "London.pm Perl M\[ou\]ngers" <london.pm at london.pm.org>
> 
> --- On Mon, 15/2/10, James Laver <james.laver at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> From: James Laver <james.laver at gmail.com>
> 
>> As I shall shortly be leaving london
>> for somewhere with no PM group, I
>> thought it might be nice to create one.
>> 
>> How do I go about it?
> 
> I rebuilt portland.pm from scratch. We had a "group", but they hadn't met in over a year and when I took over, I made a few mistakes.  However, it's now one of the strongest, most active groups in the world. Here's what I and my successors did:
> 
> 1.  Never miss holding a meeting.  Ever.  If you don't have a technical, have a social. We had technicals followed by socials.
> 
> 2.  Try to arrange to have chromatic, Allison Randal, Schwern, Ingy, Randal Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, Ward Cunningham, and Jeff Zucker move to your city.  It makes for fantastic presentations.
> 
> 3.  If the above people live in your city, encourage them to leave.  Other people wind up being too intimidated to give presentations.  That's a hell of an audience if you're showing off your thalidomide-baby Perl.  Fortunately, they were also a very respectful audience.
> 
> 4.  If the above people live in your city, encourage one of them to not show up falling down drunk at a technical meeting.  The comedic value is astonishingly short-lived. [1]
> 
> 5.  Coordinate with other user groups in the area for cross-disciple presentations.  Don't get into language wars with them.  Respect means a lot.
> 
> 42.  Always know where your towel is.  Towel is a euphemism for "projector".  Crowding around someone's laptop makes for a lousy presentation.  Make sure this towel works with your laptop.
> 
> 6.  Always have a back up presenter.  Randal was great for this and he saved my @$$ more than once.
> 
> 7.  Always have a back up *presentation*.  Staying up late the night before to write one because your presenter dropped out is no fun.
> 
> 8.  If there are local companies which use Perl, see if they'll donate meeting space.  If they do, they'll often have towels.
> 
> 9.  Try to get the presentation sent to you beforehand and make sure you can display it on your laptop in case your towel doesn't plug into their laptop.
> 
> 10.  Make sure that some presentations appeal to newer programmers.  This was one of our biggest weaknesses at portland.pm (I don't know about now).
> 
> 11.  Try to make sure your group leader is named Joshua.  It helps, really.
> 
> 12.  Open up every meeting with an amusing video.  People really like this.
> 
> Cheers,
> Ovid
> 
> [1].  Don't email me offlist and ask who this is.  I'm not telling.  Period.
> 
> --
> Buy the book         - http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/perlhks/
> Tech blog            - http://use.perl.org/~Ovid/journal/
> Twitter              - http://twitter.com/OvidPerl
> Official Perl 6 Wiki - http://www.perlfoundation.org/perl6
> 
> 

-- 

Mike Stok <mike at stok.ca>
http://www.stok.ca/~mike/

The "`Stok' disclaimers" apply.




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